I'm downloading Oracle Linux 6,2 64-bit with the single intention to simply install Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition and I've never used or installed Oracle Linux before. I know that in order to install Oracle 11g database, I will need to have some kind of graphic utility like X but I do not need a Desktop Environment like Gnome or KDE (which is not permitted on servers per company policy). Can someone tell me what exactly or which specific options I will need to minimally install Oracle database 11g? I don't want to install the entire DVD content to my server but rather know what packages are required and ONLY install those. I don't know if the Linux installer has a fairly self explanatory / easy to use options based on me using this system as a database server but if anyone can please help, I'd greatly appreciate it!

To be able to run the Oracle RDBMS installer you need to run X Server on your PC. You can install free Xming and PuTTy or give MobaXterm from http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net a try. Basically you start the X Server on your computer and establish a SSH session with X-forwarding, e.g. ssh -X oracle@server-ip-number. You must not set any DISPLAY variable or use legacy Xhost authentication since SSH will take care of it.

I don't know if the Linux installer has a fairly self explanatory / easy to use options based on me using this system as a database server

Nobody can possibly know what you might consider easy or difficult. The best way to find out is to try it.

So I did a basic server installation (not minimal) of Oracle 6.2 and followed the instructions to install the Oracle Yum public mirror in the mirror repository but when I SSH into the server, I don't appear to have the correct / required X11 or Xorg packages / libraries installed:

So my question is how can I find out what packages Oracle requires for installation. Usually all software has a required list of dependencies and such but I can't find anything that gives me a list. I don't want to do a 'silent' installation just yet and omit the OUI (Oracle Universal Installer).

xclock is just an X window client application with a small footprint. It is often used to test if X Server is working.

you can install it using sudo yum –y install xorg-x11-apps xauth

So my question is how can I find out what packages Oracle requires for installation.

That's where yum install oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall comes into play as previously mentioned. It will do the complete setup required to install Oracle RDBMS server, including oracle account, kernel parameters and necessary software packages.

And btw, the Oracle OUI installer will still complain about missing packages when performing the prerequisite check since OL 6 did not exist when the Oracle 11g installation was designed. You can simply press the "ignore" button.

Dude wrote:
And btw, the Oracle OUI installer will still complain about missing packages when performing the prerequisite check since OL 6 did not exist when the Oracle 11g installation was designed. You can simply press the "ignore" button.

Thanks a million. I would have saw this and just assumed I did something wrong. I appreciate you bringing this to my attention! Very helpful... ;)

Dude wrote:
And btw, the Oracle OUI installer will still complain about missing packages when performing the prerequisite check since OL 6 did not exist when the Oracle 11g installation was designed. You can simply press the "ignore" button.

If you use 11.2.0.3 downloaded from My Oracle Support on OL6, you should get no pre-requisite warnings. They were all fixed with the release of 11.2.0.3, so a minimal install of OL6 + oracle-rdbms-server-11gR2-preinstall should install everything for the pre-requisite checks to pass. Assuming you have enough swap configured or anything else that's totally outside of our control. :)

Sorry everyone but I've retured back from vacation to focus back on getting Oracle Database 11.2.0.3 installed on Oracle Linux 6.2 64-bit. I've got the O.S. up and I thought I selected all the correct / required packages to perform the standard installation using the Universal Installer but it's not working for some reason. I'm unable to forward my 'xclock' session from the database server host to my workstation (Ubuntu 12.04 Linux). When I open a terminal window on my Ubuntu Linux machine and type 'xclock', the application opens w/o any issues. When I SSH into my Oracle database server and attempt to forward the X11 session over to my machine, I get:

Are you setting the DISPLAY variable manually? SSH automatically takes care of the DISPLAY variable and sets it typically to localhost:10.0 for the first session. There are lot of instructions still floating around that instructs to use Xhost and setting the DISPALY variable, but these instructions apparently do not take SSH with X11 forwarding into account.

Make sure you do not have a DISPLAY environment variable set in any of your startup or login profiles and do not set it manually, which overwrites the DISPLAY variable set by SSH X11 forwarding.

Also, you cannot use the "su" command within a SSH session with X11 forwarding as it will break X11 authentication.

Oh so that's what that 'man' page is for...I see now LOL. I just used -Y and it worked fine but thanks for explaining why it didn't work previously. I guess it's hard to do it when you tell it to disable.

Dude wrote:
Also, you cannot use the "su" command within a SSH session with X11 forwarding as it will break X11 authentication.

Yes indeed. This appeared to be my issue and I totally forgot this bit me in the but previously. When I SSH into Oracle Linux as a regular user and don't 'su' to any other user, it works fine. Thanks all. Going to proceed with the OUI and see how it goes...